23/08/2026
Today we commemorate Lance Corporal Jared Mackinney.
Lance Corporal Jared MacKinney got the name from his father-in-law, David, the first time the two of them met. It stuck. His family used it. So did every mate he ever had.
He was a climber as a kid. Anything with height to it, he was up it, and that never really stopped. Later it was downhill mountain biking, and the first serious bike he owned cost him more than his first car. He joined the Air Force Cadets at Amberley and was named Most Outstanding Cadet in his first year. He played representative hockey for New South Wales, then the family moved to Queensland, he took up rugby league, and he went for the Bulldogs. His mother Jane said he was competitive with himself more than with anyone else.
He joined the Army in 2002 and went to 6 RAR in Brisbane, and he stayed there for the rest of his life.
Before Uruzgan he wore a blue beret.
In October 2003 the battalion deployed to East Timor on Operation Citadel to relieve 1 RAR, and Jared went over on a sub-unit rotation from January to April 2004. He was twenty-one. The battalion group had a Fijian rifle company inside it and had already been reduced in size for the drawdown. When 6 RAR came home that May, the military component of the United Nations Mission of Support in East Timor came to its end. He was there for the finish of it.
His medals say it plainly. His East Timor recognition is the Australian Service Medal with clasp East Timor, alongside the United Nations medal for UNMISET.
He was a peacekeeper first, and six years later he was mentoring another army in another valley. Different beret. Same work. Stand alongside somebody else's soldiers and help them hold their own ground.
Iraq came in 2006. Afghanistan in 2008. Afghanistan again from February 2010, with Mentoring Task Force 1.
He and Beckie had eleven years together. She called them the most amazing eleven years. Their daughter was three, and in Jared's eyes she could do no wrong. There was a boy on the way, due while Jared was still in country. He had worked out the boy would be five weeks old by the time he got home. He told Beckie he was looking forward to meeting his little man.
Sixteen years ago today, a partnered Australian and Afghan patrol left Patrol Base Anar Juy for the village of Derapet, in the Tangi Valley. They were engaged by a numerically superior and coordinated force firing from multiple positions. Jared's element moved forward to reinforce the Australians and Afghans already in the fight. A single round hit him.
His mates say he was carrying his section's machine gun at the time, having taken it off a soldier who had nothing left.
They pulled him out of the fire and worked on him in the open, and they would not leave him. The Victoria Cross citation for Corporal Daniel Keighran records what he did while they worked, standing up on the ridgeline under heavy fire to draw it away from the men treating Jared, and then clearing the landing zone so he could be lifted out. Jared could not be saved. He was 28.
On 10 September 2010, 6 RAR carried him into a church at Ashgrove in the rain. David stood up and told the room he could not have hand-picked a better son-in-law, and he told them Jared's motto: happy wife, happy life.
Beckie was in labour through all of it and told nobody.
Their son was born that afternoon. He carries his father's name in the middle of his own.
A year later his medals and his slouch hat were on a cabinet in the family home on the Sunshine Coast. His watch was up there too, and the alarm still went off twice a day, at the times he had set it in Afghanistan.
His name is on Panel 1 of the Roll of Honour in Canberra, in the city where he was born. It is on a wall at the Queensland Garden of Remembrance, on a plaque at Yungaburra, on honour rolls at Geraldton, at Sale and at Two Wells. And on this date at Enoggera, 6 RAR gathers at the Memorial Grove, with his family among them.
Sixteen years, and the room is still full.
Rest easy, Crash.
We remember you.
Lest we forget.
